4. The Yoga System
The Holy Men—The antiquity of “Yoga”—Its meaning—The eight stages of discipline—The aim of “Yoga”—The miracles of the “Yogi”—The sincerity of “Yoga”
In a fair, still spot
Having fixed his abode—not too much raised,
Nor yet too low—let him abide, his goods
A cloth, a deerskin, and the Kusha-grass.
There, setting hard his mind upon the One,
Restraining heart and senses, silent, calm,
Let him accomplish Yoga, and achieve
Pureness of soul, holding immovable
Body and neck and head, his gaze absorbed
Upon his nose-end, rapt from all around,
Tranquil in spirit, free of fear, intent
Upon his Brahmacharya vow, devout,
Musing on Me, lost in the thought of Me.†
On the bathing-ghats, scattered here and there among reverent Hindus, indifferent Moslems and staring tourists, sit the Holy Men, or Yogis, in whom the religion and philosophy of India find their ultimate and strangest expression. In lesser numbers one comes upon them in the woods or on the roadside, immovable and absorbed. Some are old, some are young; some wear a rag over the shoulders, some a cloth over the loins; some are clothed only in dust of ashes, sprinkled over the body and into the mottled hair. They squat cross-legged and motionless, staring at their noses or their navels. Some of them look squarely into the face of the sun hour after hour, day after day, letting themselves go slowly blind; some surround themselves with hot fires during the midday heat; some walk barefoot upon hot coals, or empty the coals upon their heads; some lie naked for thirty-five years on beds of iron spikes; some roll their bodies thousands of miles to a place of pilgrimage; some chain themselves to trees, or imprison themselves in cages, until they die; some bury themselves in the earth up to their necks, and remain that way for years or for life; some pass a wire through both cheeks, making it impossible to open the jaws, and so condemning themselves to live on liquids; some keep their fists clenched so long that their nails come through the back of the hand; some hold up an arm or a leg until it is withered and dead. Many of them sit quietly in one position, perhaps for years, eating leaves and nuts brought to them by the people, deliberately dulling every sense, and concentrating every thought, in the resolve to understand. Most of them avoid spectacular methods, and pursue truth in the quiet retreat of their homes.
We have had such men in our Middle Ages, but we should have to look for them today in the nooks and crannies of Europe and America. India has had them for 2500 years—possibly from the prehistoric days when, perhaps, they were the shamans of savage tribes. The system of ascetic meditation known as Yoga existed in the time of the Vedas;90 the Upanishads and the Mahabharata accepted it; it flourished in the age of Buddha;91 and even Alexander, attracted by the ability of these “gymnosophists” to bear pain silently, stopped to study them, and invited one of their number to come and live with him. The Yogi refused as firmly as Diogenes, saying that he wanted nothing from Alexander, being content with the nothing that he had. His fellow ascetics laughed at the Macedonian’s boyish desire to conquer the earth when, as they told him, only a few feet of it sufficed for any man, alive or dead. Another sage, Calanus (326 B.C.), accompanied Alexander to Persia; growing ill there, he asked permission to die, saying that he preferred death to illness; and calmly mounting a funeral pyre, he allowed himself to be burned to death without uttering a sound—to the astonishment of the Greeks, who had never seen this unmurderous sort of bravery before.92 Two centuries later (ca. 150B.C.), Patanjali brought the practices and traditions of the system together in his famous Yoga-sutras, which are still used as a text in Yoga centers from Benares to Los Angeles.93 Yuan Chwang, in the seventh century A.D., described the system as having thousands of devotees;94 Marco Polo, about 1296, gave a vivid description of it;95 today, after all these centuries, its more extreme followers, numbering from one to three million in India,96still torture themselves to find the peace of understanding. It is one of the most impressive and touching phenomena in the history of man.
What is Yoga? Literally, a yoke: not so much a yoking or union of the soul with the Supreme Being,97 as the yoke of ascetic discipline and abstinence which the aspirant puts upon himself in order to cleanse his spirit of all material limitations, and achieve supernatural intelligence and powers.98 Matter is the root of ignorance and suffering; therefore Yoga seeks to free the soul from all sense phenomena and all bodily attachment; it is an attempt to attain supreme enlightenment and salvation in one life by atoning in one existence for all the sins of the soul’s past incarnations.99
Such enlightenment cannot be won at a stroke; the aspirant must move towards it step by step, and no stage of the process can be understood by anyone who has not passed through the stages before it; one comes to Yoga only by long and patient study and self-discipline. The stages of Yogaare eight:
I. Yama, or the death of desire; here the soul accepts the restraints of ahimsa and Brahmacharia, abandons all self-seeking, emancipates itself from all material interests and pursuits, and wishes well to all things.100
II. Niyama, a faithful observance of certain preliminary rules for Yoga: cleanliness, content, purification, study, and piety.
III. Asana, posture; the aim here is to still all movement as well as all sensation; the best asana for this purpose is to place the right foot upon the left thigh and the left foot upon the right thigh, to cross the hands and grasp the two great toes, to bend the chin upon the chest, and direct the eyes to the tip of the nose.101
IV. Pranayama, or regulation of the breath: by these exercises one may forget everything but breathing, and in this way clear his mind for the passive emptiness that must precede absorption; at the same time one may learn to live on a minimum of air, and may let himself, with impunity, be buried in the earth for many days.
V. Pratyahara, abstraction; now the mind controls all the senses, and withdraws itself from all sense objects.
VI. Dharana, or concentration—the identification or filling of the mind and the senses with one idea or object to the exclusion of everything else.* The fixation of any one object long enough will free the soul of all sensation, all specific thought, and all selfish desire; then the mind, abstracted from things, will be left free to feel the immaterial essence of reality.†
VII. Dhyana, or meditation: this is an almost hypnotic condition, resulting from Dharana; it may be produced, says Patanjali, by the persistent repetition of the sacred syllable Om. Finally, as the summit of Yoga, the ascetic arrives at
VIII. Samadhi, or trance contemplation; even the last thought now disappears from the mind; empty, the mind loses consciousness of itself as a separate being;103 it is merged with totality, and achieves a blissful and godlike comprehension of all things in One. No words can describe this condition to the uninitiate; no intellect or reasoning can find or formulate it; “through Yoga must Yoga be known.”104
Nevertheless it is not God, or union with God, that the yogi seeks; in the Yoga philosophy God (Ishvara) is not the creator or preserver of the universe, or the rewarder and punisher of men, but merely one of several objects on which the soul may meditate as a means of achieving concentration and enlightenment. The aim, frankly, is that dissociation of the mind from the body, that removal of all material obstruction from the spirit, which brings with it, in Yoga theory, supernatural understanding and capacity.105 If the soul is cleansed of all bodily subjection and involvement it will not be united with Brahman, it will be Brahman; for Brahman is precisely that hidden spiritual base, that selfless and immaterial soul, which remains when all sense attachments have been exercised away. To the extent to which the soul can free itself from its physical environment and prison it becomes Brahman, and exercises Brahman’s intelligence and power. Here the magical basis of religion reappears, and almost threatens the essence of religion itself—the worship of powers superior to man.
In the days of the Upanishads, Yoga was pure mysticism—an attempt to realize the identity of the soul with God. In Hindu legend it is said that in ancient days seven Wise Men, or Rishis, acquired, by penance and meditation, complete knowledge of all things.106In the later history of IndiaYoga became corrupted with magic, and thought more of the power of miracles than of the peace of understanding. The Yogi trusts that by Yoga he will be able to anesthetize and control any part of his body by concentrating upon it;107he will be able at will to make himself invisible, or to prevent his body from being moved, or to pass in a moment from any part of the earth, or to live as long as he desires, or to know the past and the future, and the most distant stars.108
The sceptic must admit that there is nothing impossible in all this; fools can invent more hypotheses than philosophers can ever refute, and philosophers often join them in the game. Ecstasy and hallucinations can be produced by fasting and self-mortification, concentration may make one locally or generally insensitive to pain; and there is no telling what reserve energies and abilities lurk within the unknown mind. Many of the Yogis, however, are mere beggars who go though their penances in the supposedly Occidental hope of gold, or in the simple human hunger for notice and applause.* Asceticism is the reciprocal of sensuality, or at best an attempt to control it; but the attempt itself verges upon a masochistic sensuality in which the ascetic takes an almost erotic delight in his pain. The Brahmans have wisely abstained from such practices, and have counseled their followers to seek sanctity through the conscientious performance of the normal duties of life.110